1. Field of the Invention
The invention is in the area of computer methods to control online avatars used in virtual worlds and computer simulations of real world environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Prior art online social networks offer a chance to stay connected with existing friends, meet new people, express one's self and one's thoughts, share photos, links and posts, and also offer additional applications such as games and dating.
Although the online social network market has expanded very rapidly in recent years, the market is dynamic, as different particular social networks and their associated organizations can increase and decrease in popularity. MySpace for example was initially a very strong contender in this field, but then fell out of favor. At present, the field is dominated by Facebook, with other major sites including Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Google+ and Tagged.
As of October 2011, Facebook claims more than 800 million active users, that more than 50% of their active users log onto Facebook every day, and that the average Facebook user has approximately 130 friends.
At the same time, online graphical social games, such as Zynga (makers of popular Facebook games such as Mafia Wars, Farmville, and the like), World of Warcraft, and the like have also become popular. Zynga, for example itself has millions of active users. However these prior art social games generally have user bases that are composed of users who have signed up for the game itself. Although individuals in these games may design avatars (i.e. computer representations of the user's game alter ego) to play the game, these avatars will generally bear little relationship to the user's real life appearance and characteristics. Indeed this is part of the appeal of these games, because a small person in real life, for example, may want to portray themselves as large and imposing in the game.
Previous art in this area includes U.S. Pat. No. 6,772,195 B1, US application US 2009/0271714 A1, and US 2008/0040673 A1.
Avatars can be a useful method to facilitate online social interactions, because they enable a user to draw upon his or her real world experience, and make the online interactions more realistic and compelling. In particular, prior art, such as Megiddo, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,559,863 discussed use of avatars in a cocktail party type setting, where the size of the user's avatars or the size of the avatar's conversation text differs as a function of the avatar's location in the virtual room.
Hatleid, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,722,195 discussed various methods of controlling online avatars to produce conversational “chat clusters”. Other workers, such as Bates, US patent application 2009/0172539 discussed methods of incorporating various trust levels into avatar based online communications.
Despite these advances, online communications employing avatars still must overcome an effect that has been termed the “uncanny valley”. This a problem shows up when synthetic representations of humans (e.g. avatars) act enough like humans to generate expectations of normal human appearance or behavior, but then frustrate these expectations, thus causing a feeling of strangeness of lack of comfort on the part of the real human users of the system.
Thus improved methods of controlling avatars would be desirable and useful, because such methods would facilitate online computer assisted communications among various human users.